How
do chimpanzees learn about new environments – where food is located, how to
capture prey, and how to navigate between different places? We are
investigating these questions using a virtual environment called Adventure
Park that
the chimpanzees can move around in using a touchscreen. Adventure Park is huge
and filled with trees, rocks, islands in a lake, a waterfall, a cliff, and
more! There are various fruits
scattered
around, which the chimpanzees can collect to receive real fruit rewards. In one
location in the environment, there is a lot of food clustered close together,
and we’re interested to see if the chimpanzees learn and remember this location
and take the shortest path to it. Another location has fruit that, once
collected, reappears after a few minutes. Will the chimpanzees learn that they
can re-collect this fruit, and will they figure out approximately when it
reappears? These tasks mimic the foraging challenges that chimpanzees face in
the wild: remembering where high densities of fruit are located and how soon
they can revisit the same fruit trees after eating from them.
Adventure
Park also contains different
types of prey –
rabbits and pigs – that the chimpanzees can catch for fruit rewards. The
rabbits are slow enough to catch by chasing, but the pigs are faster, so the
chimpanzees have
to
figure out a different way to catch them. Will the chimpanzees learn to
distinguish between the different types of prey and use different strategies to
catch them?